Author Francesca Segal on Edith Wharton, Writing from a Male Perspective, and What She Misses Most About New York

In our June issue, young British novelist Francesca Segal writes about the book that inspired her first novel: Edith Wharton’s Gilded Age masterpiece The Age of Innocence. Segal’s well-turned update, The Innocents (Voice), transposes the classic showdown between convention and freedom from New York to northwest London—specifically, to the close-knit Jewish enclave of Hampstead Garden Suburb where Segal was raised. There, we meet a young lawyer, Adam Newman, and his sheltered fiancée, Rachel, the kind of girl who names her dog Schnitzel. Just as the wedding machinery gets underway, Rachel’s alluringly worldly cousin Ellie, a troubled model who represents the possibility of another kind of life, arrives on the scene.

In her Vogue essay, Segal recounts a reversal of her own: her surprise, having fled the parochial-feeling Hampstead for a writing career in New York, at meeting and falling in love with a childhood acquaintance who grew up around the corner. We caught up with Segal via e-mail.

In The Innocents, you write from the perspective of Adam, an ambitious young lawyer who finds himself falling for the wrong woman. What was it like for you inhabit a man’s point of view?I must say, at the beginning I was anxious that male readers might not find it convincing, and it was a huge relief when men began to read it and have all found it believable. But the actual experience of doing it was an absolute pleasure. It’s not just that Adam is a man but that he also sees the world so differently from the way I see it—I suspect he and I would disagree on a good deal! One of the greatest pleasures of writing fiction is the ability to time-travel, to mind-read, to transmogrify—to inhabit another psyche.

In your essay, you recall reading The Age of Innocence for the first time, and your delight in connecting its themes to your own experience. As for your own characters, do you identify more with Rachel or Ellie? The background of the novel is a world I know extremely well, but the characters are ones I have created. I hope it isn’t dodging the question to say that I think there are elements of me in both of those women—just as, almost by definition, there are fragments of me in Adam. I think there are perhaps elements of both Rachel and Ellie in Adam, too, which is why the choice between them is so agonizing. They represent his own urges for security and freedom: his conventional side and the side of him that wants something bigger.Has your family read the book? What do your neighbors in Hampstead think of it? My family has read it, but they are so unlike the characters and families in the novel, they never for a moment thought it was anything other than fiction. Showing them was very uncontroversial. As for everyone else, it’s not been out too long here in England, but so far the reaction from Hampstead has been very positive. Unexpectedly so—you must know the phrase, “two Jews, three opinions.” My favorite response so far has been from a Muslim reader, who e-mailed me to say that she’d grown up in London too, and the community in the novel was exactly like her own. Finding one’s own path is something we all struggle with, and while the cultural details might differ, the central dilemma is timeless and universal.

Now that you’ve returned to London to live with your husband, what do you miss most about New York?Where do I start? Everything! I’m trying to come back to New York as often as I can. I miss the seasons, the West Village, the nail bar on the corner of my block, the New York Public Library; I miss the fresh coconuts at the juice bar in my gym, I miss the 92nd Street Y, the absurdly-sized cupcakes at Crumbs (and don’t even try and convince me that Magnolia is better!), I miss the Strand bookstore. Neutrogena SPF 90 sunscreen. The breathtaking Sushi Yasuda. And I’m sure it sounds mad, but I really miss Ziploc bags. Plastic sandwich bags from British supermarkets are terrible—they’re never strong enough for marinating a whole chicken!

To read Francesca Segal’s essay, “Full Circle,” and an excerpt of her novel, purchase the June issue of Vogue.